James Hynes - Next

Lynda sucks in her breath and her cunt seizes tightly around Kevin’s cock and Kevin feels it all the way up his spine and down to his toes, blood pounding in his temples, his heart squeezing tighter than a fist, as if it will never relax again. He clenches his arms around her back, digging his fingers into her; he groans wordlessly into the salty flesh of her shoulder. He can feel his balls pumping into her. Then Lynda goes slack, her head drooping over his shoulder, her ass sagging back against his knees. His own limbs turn rubbery and he can barely hold her up, her sweat pooling under his palms. Through her tangled hair he sees bodies thumping in the living room, limned in red light. Nobody’s in the window anymore. It’s another song now, they fucked right past the end of the last one. Lynda’s pulse is still pounding, she’s panting against his cheek. His own heart is beating again, slow and hard, and he feels postcoital lassitude spreading through him like a barbiturate. Lynda sighs and rocks back, counting on him to keep her from sliding off his lap to the porch. Her breasts gleam in dark, and she lifts her elbows one more time and brushes back her sweat-stringy strands of hair and gives him the slowest, dirtiest smile he’s ever seen, before or since, the same smile she’ll give him a month or so later, when he finds her in bed with another guy.

“Hey, mister.” The cabbie is looking right at Kevin through the gap between the minivan’s bucket seats.

So what if I didn’t love her — she didn’t love me, no big deal. That night on the porch wasn’t even the best sex he ever had, but it’s the moment he always comes back to, and after fingering this memory threadbare for all these years, he knows it’s only because of where it happened and who might have been watching. Did he really love the Philosopher’s Daughter? Has he ever really loved any of the women he’s known? Has any of them ever really loved him? He’s pretty sure he loved Beth, but they fought all the time. The worst he can say about Stella is that she irritates him, frustrates him, bores him, but Beth, holy shit, Beth used to send him into a rage. There were shouting matches and tears and slammed doors and a couple of times the flinging of substantial objects, capable of inflicting injury. She threw a plate at him once, and he just laughed and said, “A plate? Really? You couldn’t find the rolling pin?” and then she threw another one at him. And once he threw a book at her, a hardcover copy of Rabbit Is Rich, which is a pretty big book, bruising her backside and making him feel guilty for weeks afterward. But that’s what proves he loved her — at least that’s what he tells himself — the fact that they stayed together for so long despite driving each other crazy. It was the longest relationship he’s ever had, it went on for years, but in all that time together he never shook the feeling that she was still making up her mind about him, and in the end, when she did make up her mind, she left. When Beth decided at long last to have a child, she found somebody else to have it with. She didn’t want it to be his, not any more. Stella, on the other hand, tells him all the time she loves him, but always in passing — in the aisle at Gaia, or squeezing him from behind at the kitchen counter, or at the end of a phone call, saying “Love you” in the same singsong way she’d say “Keep in touch” or “Take care.” Never face to face, never in some tender moment, never in bed. She never even meets his eye when she says it. Maybe she thinks she’s wearing him down, like drops of water on a stone. But who’s he to complain? He’s never told her at all he loves her, not once, not even just to be polite, the way he has upon occasion with other women. Yet Stella, thinks Kevin, whom I don’t love, and who may not really love me — maybe she’s just being polite — Stella not only wants to have a child, she wants to have a child with me. She wants us to have a child. She wants to have my child.

“Mister, you’re here.” The cabbie’s glaring at him, tears welling out of the corner of his eyes. “You gotta get out now.”

“I’m sorry,” Kevin says, shifting in his seat, detumescent at last. He glances out the window, where he’s surprised to see the ice-blue doors of One Longhorn Place, Barad-dûr. He’s even more surprised to see the cabbie sniffling in the driver’s seat. “Are you okay?” Kevin says.

The cabbie shakes the cell phone like a rattle or a talisman, knuckling tears away with his other hand. “Sixth and Congress, mister, you gotta get out now. I gotta go.”

“Okay, sure, yeah.” Kevin fumbles for the seat belt release. “What do I owe you?” He looks at the meter and yanks out his wallet, hoping he still has enough after the last cab ride and lunch with Dr. Barrientos.

“Just go, man. No charge.”

“Sorry?” Kevin freezes with his fingers in his wallet.

The cabbie’s facing forward again, scraping the heel of his hand over his sharp cheekbones, wiping away tears.

“Just be gettin’ out of my cab, okay?” He draws a sharp breath and lets it out. “My brother’s alive and I gotta go, so it’s free, okay?”

“Okay,” Kevin says warily, wondering if the guy’s trying to pull some sort of scam. “You’re sure?”

“Man, will you go? ” cries the cabbie, nearly sobbing, and Kevin flinches and stuffs his wallet away and fumbles for the door. “Listen, thanks,” he says, untangling the seat belt, yanking on the door. “I appreciate it, I hope everything’s okay with your, with your…”

The cabbie’s hammering the steering wheel with his wrist, already checking his mirrors so he can pull away as soon as this stammering idiot is out of his cab. “Gonna be a bad day for everybody today.” He glances back at Kevin one last time. “You need to pay attention, man.”

Kevin’s out in the heat again, patting his pockets, making sure he hasn’t left anything behind. The cab starts to pull away before he’s even shut the door, and he yells, “Wait! Lemme get the door!” But without stopping the cabbie reaches back with his long arm and hauls it shut, then guns the cab through the intersection as the light turns yellow, leaving Kevin curbside by the rush of downtown traffic, with the unforgiving sun beating straight down on the top of his head.

Kevin’s a little disoriented, and he looks up and down the street to situate himself — south down the canyon of Congress toward the two squashed ziggurats by the river, then up at the capitol squatting under the steep sun of midafternoon. The sidewalk is crowded with lunchtime pedestrians, businessmen and women traveling in packs, or alone and chatting on cell phones, all of them sifting through the scruffy homeless orbiting a bus stop. The clock on the corner of Sixth and Congress tells him his interview is still forty-five minutes away, but it’s time to quit screwing around, so he cuts across the stream of pedestrians to the tower, hauls at the glass door— pongggg —and steps into the arctic AC. Time to get this over with so he can go back to the airport, get on the plane, and go home.

As he squeaks across the lobby floor toward the elevator alcoves, he buttons the top button of his shirt and tightens the knot of his tie. He’s a little queasy with adolescent test anxiety — instead of wandering and woolgathering he should have been thinking all this time about the interview, he should have brought with him the Web pages he printed off from the Hemphill Associates site and reviewed them on the plane — but he quashes the feeling, reminds himself he doesn’t even want the job. He loosens the tie again. The tower’s lobby reverberates with indistinct voices, like a museum. The black woman in the blazer is standing behind the rampart of the security desk, and she’s been joined by another blazered colleague, a tall, rangy white guy with a bushy Josef Stalin moustache, and together they’re watching the big, silent flatscreen on the lobby wall. In fact, a loose group of people has gathered under the screen just beyond the security desk, faces all tilted up at the unnaturally vivid image. Kevin notes only the aggressive red, white, and blue of Fox as he turns to the touch screen in the prow of the desk, where the Texas flag waves on its endless loop. He thumbs the cool glass, the video keyboard flickers up, and he touches H for Hemphill Associates.